Praise the little woman!

A conversation I had recently reminded me of something that always used to bug me when I was a Stargate fan: several of the producers frequently go out of their way to flatter Amanda Tapping (Sam Carter) whether she’s present for the commentary or not. They’re always on about how smart she is, because she actually understands the lines they write for her about bizarre physics theories. How beautiful her “big doe eyes” are. How luminescent the above-mentioned eyes are. How beautiful she is. What a gifted actress she is. How amazing she is, that she can deliver all this technobabble they saddle her with (ETA: which is amazing, but the fact that they dump it on her because the guys won’t do it speaks volumes about that). And they deliver these comments almost verbatim, over and over – like they’re working off a script Sci-Fi or MGM gave them. Which, I suspect, is the case.

It comes across as condescending, especially as they never say similar things about Michael Shanks, who a damn fine job playing an equally intelligent character, and looks equally good on screen. Why do they make such a point of it with Tapping, while letting Shanks’ abilities and looks speak for themselves?

I suspect they’re overcompensating. Maybe Sci-Fi or MGM was anxious to convince people they like women, even as they weakened Tapping’s character due to a collective lack of interest in anything but her love life. So much easier to sprinkle flattery throughout the afterthought commentaries than it is to, you know, write Sam a good story.

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Maybe its a pre-emptive strike? You know, tell the world how great she is to work with and what a fantastic actress she is, so it’s harder for her to speak out otherwise? Meanwhile, they just keep giving Shanks the best lines.

I don’t read much into such interviews, they’re basicaly sales and marketing pitches for the consumption of the general public and almost certainly based on what they think others want to hear more than anything else.

I thought DVD commentaries were more targeted toward core fans. I assume the sort of people who still need to be coaxed into watching the show regularly aren’t going to dig into the commentaries.

And while I’m sure some core fans want to hear how great Tapping is, there certainly are a lot who want to hear how great Shanks is, as evidenced by the campaign to bring Daniel back when he left. Yet, he gets almost no mention outside of the double episode where he returned… the commentary for which he participated in.

Do these commentaries predate or postdate Michael Shanks’ period away? If the latter, that would support Scarlett’s preemptive strike theory. Perhaps Amanda Tapping herself isn’t too happy about the degradation of her character.

[A good time to admit that I didn’t realise how degraded her character was until reading the perspectives here; a reason to be grateful for stumbling across this site]

I can’t say for sure when the DVD’s were made. I think most of the remarks came in episodes that aired close to or after Shanks’ departure, which suggests that, given the lag between filming and making the DVD’s, they at least knew he was going to leave. But again, this is speculation.

And Tapping has complained on the DVD commentaries about her breasts being backlit by computer screens (only to be hushed by director Martin Wood assuring her it doesn’t look tacky or distracting), and she’s also commented on scenes where she just didn’t feel Sam was in character. She also lamented the deleted scene from Ascension in which Sam “went a little dark side on her superiors”. She doesn’t describe the scene much more than that, but I fully support her desire for us to see another side of Sam… one I guess just isn’t ladylike enough for TPTB.

I’ve been catching up on back articles on this website (and agree with a great deal of what you say).

That being said, as a particle astrophycist, one of the things I do honestly give Amanda Tapping great props for (especially in the early seasons) was the fact that she clearly made some effort to read up on the technobabble she was delivering and it showed in the way she delivered her lines. One of the things I loved about Carter, particularly early on, was that she was one of the few scientist characters (male or female) on TV that didn’t have me groaning within ten seconds “God, he/she cannot possibly understand a word of what they are actually saying.”

So the way they may go on and on about how great the actress is may be creepy, but she honestly deserves the points for that one.

Amanda, that’s absolutely true. In fact I’ve mentioned it myself more than once in discussions about her in Stargate communities, but re-reading the post just now I realized I totally left it out. I’ve edited to clear that up.

I admire what she did with the technobabble. But that was also quite a burden they put on her – to hear the guys tell it in the commentaries, the writers started dumping it all on her because the male actors wouldn’t do it. (There are lines that only Sam could say, but they also handed her difficult lines that could as easily have been said by Jack or Daniel, at least before Jack turned stupid.)

I agree, it eventually becomes a real burden on the character. I think that’s partly because as the series goes on, the scientific subplots are increasingly badly written and the technology increasingly Star Trek in nature, which means that layering all of that onto her shoves her farther into plots that are no longer interesting either on the psychological level or the “puzzle” level that they manage so well in early shows like “A Matter of Time.” But the other (and worse half) of the problem is that they somehow decided all technobabble was equal, that since Amanda Tapping was so good at doing the physics and general physical sciences technobabble she could do all technobabble, no matter how far it was from Carter’s original areas of expertise. This (more than the ship issue, in my view) is what started to turn the character into more of a Mary-Sue and started the “perfect Carter” phenomenon. The actress’ skill became a reason to screw over the character.

The thing I loved best about early Carter was that she was damn competent, but she was not Supergirl. “Solitudes” won me over because no matter how bright Carter was, a hypothermic, injured, exhausted Sam Carter with an even more injured commander was not going to have as good a chance of having the necessary insight as a warm, caffeinated Daniel—and _they showed that_. She was allowed to be both brilliant and frustrated (the reality of physics being that you spend a whole lot of time frustrated) and that was glorious.

The worst of it is that they could and should have brought in other individuals to fill some of that need, especially in Season 8, where SG-1 desperately needed junior members to round out the team, particularly science members to whom Carter could delegate some of her previous roles. It isn’t humanly realistic that she could fill both, and they screw her over by asking her to do so. [It also weakened my belief in Jack O’Neill as a competent base commander, that he puts his personal need to keep the integrity of the original SG-1 over the actual needs of the team. It is consistent with his character, but I would have really liked to see someone call him on it]. Anyway, I would have loved to see them bring in a (xeno)biologist or even a physical scientist with a strongly different area of expertise (especially if that new character was also female) and to see Carter struggle with the nature of her new role and the fact that she misses the hands-on nature of her old one. It would have been a much more interesting story than the poorly-written romantic one that they did give her.

I totally agree with all of that. When Carter started spouting archeology lines, that went well beyond the leeway I was prepared to grant them, understanding that to meet an increasingly tight budget they just couldn’t have the whole team together in every scene anymore. Even a simple, “Well, this is really Daniel’s field, but if I had to take a guess…” would have made a few scenes more palatable for me.

Of course, by the same token, Daniel was the top genius of the universe on pretty much every subject. He occasionally trumped Sam’s knowledge of astrophysics, and this got passed off as his amazing intelligence at work. Why were most viewers more inclined to overlook Daniel knowing everything but not Sam? I think it’s because Daniel was better developed – he had passions, he made mistakes. Sam became a repository for any chunk of exposition the writers didn’t feel like working into the story subtly.

Which is to say, both characters were the victims of bad writing, but Daniel got the occasional bit of damn good writing. Sam didn’t. And (I believe) the PTB’s flattery was supposed to make up for that.

Hmm. I honestly don’t remember Daniel trumping Sam’s knowledge of astrophysics, but I could have missed that, I suppose. Jonas, on the other hand…

Ultimately, though, I find it very interesting that the show’s writers start struggling to write women well around the same time that they start struggling to write reasonable science plots or scientists.

Amanda, there are a number of times when Sam is explaining a plan and Daniel takes over and finishes because he’s pieced together where she’s going with it. Other times, she suggests something, he suggests something else, she explains why his suggestion is physically impossible, he throws out a counter-argument to that, and then she realizes there is a way to implement his original suggestion with a small twist. But the reverse never seems to happen.

I actually don’t have a problem with it as a viewer – at worst, I infer Daniel is smarter than Sam, which is hardly a put down. But when I think of it from the writers’ perspectives and wonder why they made the choices they made in certain scenes, that’s when it bugs me. Sam is just exposition girl to them – it’s like she doesn’t interest them except as a shortcut to good storytelling so they can hit the golfing green early this morning. Or a big lovely pair of doe eyes.

Sorry I’m not providing examples. It’s been a while since I watched the show.

I’d be very interested to see those examples; I’m also kind of intrigued by the interpretation you’re putting on the latter dynamic. This kind of back-and-forth of ideas is really normal in my field, essential really. The fact that Daniel throws out a wacky idea, Sam nixes it, and then realizes there is a way to implement his solution with a twist—that, to me, doesn’t mean Daniel is smarter, but that he’s providing a useful service by asking questions/making suggestions outside his field of expertise. It’s a very common phenomenon, that explaining why something won’t work helps someone who is very knowledgeable understand the problem better, and therefore lets them see the solution.

Anyway, here’s a reverse example of sorts, from “Tangent”:

DANIEL
Okay! These are Tobin numbers. This is 1, this is 2, this is 3…

CARTER
Wait, wait! What about zero?

DANIEL
What?

CARTER
Zero. Why didn’t you say zero?

DANIEL
Uh…be…because there’s no zero in the Phoenician numerical system.

JACOB
What if the Tobins added it?

CARTER
He’s right! Inventing technology with this level of sophistication would require a zero.

No, I get that what Daniel’s doing is something that happens – Jack does it too. Unfortunately, my memory is not being very specific so even trolling through transcripts didn’t dig up any good examples because I was doing it more or less randomly. (The examples from Threads only stuck with me because I wrote a post on that episode. The others are all a blur now.)

I just remember watching the show from a writer’s perspective and noticing that they got very sloppy in later years about which of the “science twins” got which lines, as if anyone smarter than the writers must know everything. I also felt there were a lot of times AT got all the difficult set-up dialog, and the Big Conclusion line went to MS or RDA, and that wasn’t fair.

I actually don’t have a problem with it as a viewer – at worst, I infer Daniel is smarter than Sam, which is hardly a put down.

But Daniel wasn’t canonically anything but an Egyptian linguist. A *brilliant* one, yeah, but not *that* brilliant – Shaure had to remind him of the existence of Vowel Shifts, after all. (!) The essential charm of Dr. Jackson’s chara was that he was the quintessential bookish don, the monomaniac on his subject who’s at sea in the ‘real world,’ – but the joke is, that he’s the one who saves the day by being able to read old dusty foreign texts – and being willing to try to to talk to strangers. The techies and the macho warrior dudes all make it possible for him to get there, but without the history geek all of it would be useless. Teamwork (everyone has different talents) was kind of the moral (along with Bookish Nerd discovers Inner Hero) and we were able to empathize with him as Joe Ordinary due to his sensawunda in the face of all this amazing technology (human and ancient) despite being the Bookish Nerd – and that’s sabotaged by turning Daniel into a Wesley-Stu Supergenius Polymath that he never showed signs of being before. As well as not making sense/being at all plausible, it turns the chara into a munchkin.

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